The expression, also frequently used in the English form Research & Development and in acronym (R&S or R&D), indicates the activity of the company aimed at the innovation of production. Innovations can relate to both the techniques adopted to obtain a product (process innovation), and the product itself (product innovation). As suggested by the two terms that make up the expression, the R&D activity includes two distinct moments: research, mainly aimed at the conception and testing of new products or processes, and conducted in laboratory conditions; development, or applied research, in which research inventions take on an economic dimension and are transformed into innovations. Although both activities are aimed at the search for novelty, the first is mainly oriented to the deepening of knowledge (strategic or purely scientific), while the second is mainly aimed at the search for practical solutions or the translation of some research results in marketable applications. R&D is one of the main sources of technological innovation, but not the only one. A company can adopt a new technology generated internally, through its research laboratories, but it can also acquire it in other ways, including, for example, various learning processes (learning by doing, learning by using), acquisitions of machinery that incorporate new technologies (know-how), imitations, license agreements, collaboration agreements.In economic terms, innovations can be distinguished in incremental, attributable to qualitative improvements and production efficiency, and radical, concerning the introduction of products and completely new production processes and such as to produce real technological revolutions. The R&D function includes design activities aimed, on the one hand, at the diversification of production, and on the other hand, at satisfying new needs that have arisen or induced in consumers. It must work closely with the marketing function and the production function to avoid getting involved in experimenting products that are difficult to market. Innovation activity, in its broadest sense, could generate both advantages and disadvantages for who supports it. If, for example, the introduction on the market of a completely new product, or of a new production process that reduces i production costs, favors the company that promotes them first in terms of higher profits, it is not certain that these advantages are sufficient to compensate the costs incurred to introduce innovation. In fact, other companies could bring on the market, even in a short time, new products that they imitate innovative ones, without incurring a conspicuous waste of resources, and this could allow them to reduce or even cancel the accumulated advantage by the innovative company. The company, therefore, would no longer have the incentive to innovate because it would be deprived of the expected benefits for its innovating activity. In this way, however, it would not be only the company that would suffer but the whole community, which would lose the social benefits of innovative activity.



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